Most of us are in agreement: fuel powered cars are destructive to the environment, lethal to pedestrians and drivers, and contribute greatly to climate change, yet imagining a car free future is almost impossible to fathom.

The benefits of getting rid of cars in a country like Malta are obvious -  having walkable cities and villages near and far would usher in the next generation of human evolution, but when it comes to incentivising this change, we fall very short.

There are a number of reasons certain people are not interested in riding bicycles to work or school, the most prominent being the safety on the Maltese roads, given that the driving style is barbaric, to say the least.

But let us not fall short of only thinking that a car free future depends on bicycle mobility; there always is public transport, and with public transport comes another issue, that of irregularity with bus schedules and much more. Sure, they provide an important service, but that is the minimum that is required from them. 

There is great interest from residents of all villages to see their streets as pedestrian areas, places where children can roam free while they play with their neighbours. It almost feels like a story from the past, the Gen Z have little to no idea what that feels like.

But what is standing in the way of progress? What keeps people from moving on from the restraints of a car dependent society?

Should the government do more? Definitely. Constructing some half-drawn bicycle lanes down a bypass barely wide enough for a person let alone a bike is not exactly giving one’s maximum effort to push people to start using bicycles as a mode of transport.

Increasing the number of lanes in any given road is also not a wise step forward if we are looking to reduce the dependency of cars by the Maltese people.

Recent studies have shown that countries like Spain and certain villages in America have reduced their highways and amount of roads in their villages since it was not sustainable. These places have reverted to a fewer-lane mentality 10 years ago - Malta has just begun its mega project of adding lanes galore wherever the government can, even if the land is not theirs.

Will this decision be a regretful one down the line? For sure, the future is not one dependent on car transport and the sooner that the decisionmakers in this country can realise that, the sooner our mentality as a country will begin to improve.

The facts state that Malta needs safer roads for alternative modes of transport and Malta needs to take seriously the issue of properly incentivising these alternative modes of transport. Constructing a couple of bicycle lock devices at the university is not enough when bicycle riders have to go through the Birkirkara bypass, cycling mere centimetres from traffic, in turn risking their lives because of the lack of